Had the idea of using piezo electric to do braille a few years ago. Had no clue about uCs and decided a simple translator would be a good start. Got as far as learning grade one braille but the contractions in grade 2 scared me a little.

Would love one of these to play with my project. (and refres my braille)

For awhile, I participated in a project which aimed to make an electronic “braille” system for blind people – a single character which would change dot heights without having to move your fingers.

One problem with any system will be the speed of rendering. Blind people pass their hands across a line of braille really fast in terms of characters-per-minute.

The only thing I could think of which *might* have been fast enough to render the braille was an impact printer head. It’s straightforward to make something that will raise/lower dots in a braille pattern, but very difficult to make it fast enough to be usable.

If anyone can solve the speed problem, I think a “single char” braille reader would be a big success. Blind people wouldn’t need a wide display area for reading.

iPhone tripod mount – would be a good idea if they didn’t stick a horrible rolling shutter camera in the phone. On that note oes any phone manufacturer use a camera which DOESN’T have a rolling shutter? that kind of footage looks bad whenever the camera moves, and the increasing proliferation of rolling shutter video footage appearing on normal tv shows (and film) is not nioe to watch whenever the camera panning fast or watching traffic go by etc.
Global shutter, folks, don’t settle for less.

Macro shots of circuitboards – just what HaD needs, more Arduino porn…

The braille film has some real potential though – the possibility of dynamically controlled, physical buttons on touchscreens is perhaps the next biggest thing to happen to computer/gadget displays.

I had forgotten about wanting a Return key on a mouse entirely… The version of Firefox I have now, now has a “Paste & Go” entry in the context menu of the URL bar, so no more need to paste a URL and hit Return anymore.

If you still want/need Return on your mouse, you could get a mouse with a nav button there and remap it in software.

I like the mouse carpet idea, something for me to consider once the sides of my IntelliMouse loose much more of their rubber coating. You could always take the fabric off the mouse and wash it if it becomes too funky.